Was trying to think of some advice to help newer players with competitive gaming. Posted a new article today on GoW Nation. It's long, but I hope it's helpful.

E-Sports is on the rise and is quickly becoming a major form of entertainment. Major League Gaming just recently closed out an amazing season with some of the most impressive numbers anyone could have conceived. With 175 different countries from around the world tuning into the various weekend events, MLG viewers streamed more than 15 million hours of video. And maybe the most stunning statistic of all, Major League Gaming’s unique viewers was up 225% from the previous year! Taking a look at MLG’s success, along with the dozens of other competitive gaming sites, tournaments and leagues, you’ll find that the industry is only expanding, and with that you will see more and more people becoming interested in competitive gaming.

Maybe you’re sitting there thinking you’d like a piece of this, you consider yourself a pretty decent player and you’d like to take the next step and shoot for the top spot. Well, let me offer you some advice. I want to help outline some things you can do to get your feet wet and get ready to take the plunge into competitive gaming. Before I start I want to say that there is no right or wrong way to get involved, people work differently from one another and sometimes they take a different approach when it comes to inserting themselves into the community. This is also a topic that I feel warrants a number of articles broken up into sections, dealing with the personal steps you can take as well as how to approach a competitive team and planning your future “career”. So, let’s get to work.

Intro to Competitive Gaming: Part 1 of 3: “Baby Steps”

The most common question people who are interested in competitive gaming ask; “What can I do to start working towards being a competitive gamer?”

Again, there is no right or wrong way to insert yourself into competitive gaming, but I’m going to try and help you with the least stressful and probably the easiest way to work your way into it slowly. I tried to sum up the most important suggestions into three points. There’s still plenty that can be done, but I felt that these are these best course of action.

First, is to get yourself acquainted to the competitive scene. And what I mean is, take a look at forums, different sites that offer competitive services and take a look at what people are talking about. What tournaments are coming up? Are there any teams that are well known that you could find more about? What resources can you use to watch live games, archived footage and learn new things about the particular game you’re interested in?

Before jumping into playing competitively you have to prepare yourself. You wouldn’t go camping without making sure you have all the equipment you need. Competitive gaming involves a lot of aspects that many casual players don’t know about yet, such as, callouts, weapon and map settings, and etiquette. The more you can learn about these things beforehand, the easier it will be for you.

Strategies are also an important part to competitive gaming (obviously), so the more you can observe and understand the way competitive players think and plan the better off you’ll be and the more you’ll learn and get better yourself. Watching and analyzing video is a great way to get better. Look at what happened, and ask yourself, why did it work? Why didn’t it work? What if this happened instead? Same goes for when you play your own games. Keep in mind why you died, what could have prevented that? But this is a subject I’ll go into depth in a future article.

Second step, start slowly getting involved with the community. Try to find some people in the competitive community to play with, even if it’s just ranked. The purpose isn’t to start working on your skills necessarily, but more to introduce yourself and meet people. A large part of competitive gaming is networking and make connections with others. This will help you get better and learn more as well as prepare you to look at who you might want to team with.

Generally, you want to find people who are outgoing, someone who’s pretty knowledgeable and doesn’t claim to know every facet of the game. There’s always a way to improve your game and there’s never a definite answer to every situation, find people who are open minded, people who are willing to listen to new ideas and talk with you constructively.

Thirdly, start to play in some smaller competitive matches. Competitive players most often call them scrims. Scrim, is short for scrimmage, which is a practice match. Plenty of people like to play pick up scrims, which is a scrim made up of various players to try new strats, work on individual skills, and meet new people, another great way to find people to potentially team with.

Commonly, scrimmages are taken too seriously, and treated as a competition rather than a chance to work on different skills and new strategies. Scrimmages are for practice, losing can be demoralizing, but ultimately it’s about learning and growing. Don’t worry if you lose often! All great people have had to fail in life in order to learn and get better. The difference is, the “greats” keep working even when they keep getting knocked down.

So to wrap things up, there’s no one way that you have to get involved competitively. My personal belief is to take things slow, observe and meet people who can help you out and support you, then start to play games and get involved. You have to start small and work your way up. E-Sports is a very rewarding experience. You’ll learn how to meet new people, conduct yourself with others and how to think critically.

Next article I will go into depth about how to find a good team, what makes a good team, and how a team should work together.

If you have any questions, or would like to suggest a future article, feel free to message me on the forums, or over twitter @TheMadFiddler, or on LIVE “The Mad Fiddler”.